The Small Business Online Marketing Handbook: Converting Online Conversations to Offline Sales

Chapter 7

Reduce Overall Marketing Spend: Get Offline Customers Online

Depending on your customer demographic and sometimes your geographic region, your customers may inherently prefer to engage with you in the offline world. In other circumstances, customer preferences may dictate that you naturally market to and mostly interact with your customers online. Regardless of your starting point, the cost of traditional offline marketing—especially with the increases in postage rates—should be incentive enough for you to find its online marketing counterparts attractive. In case you haven't been sold on why you want to put energy into getting your customers online, here are a few other reasons to consider:

• Offline marketing programs typically require significantly more lead time to plan, design, and execute.
• Creative elements for offline print marketing can be significantly more expensive given the additional requirements for print-quality materials.
• Offline marketing programs tend to cost more.
• Online marketing tools offer a wealth of reporting data that helps you understand how effective your marketing strategies are.
• Because you have access to more granular data more quickly, your targeting for future programs gets better over time with online marketing when you use results from prior programs to improve on your segmentation and offer design.

So what are you waiting for? The reality is that even if you wanted to focus solely on online marketing, your competitors are most likely ...